Current collaborative research projects

Women in the Miners' Strike, 1984-85 (2018-2020)

This project's overall objective is to co-produce, with women from coalfield communities, a comprehensive study of women's activism during the miners' strike of 1984-85, and a new history of continuity and change in working-class women's lives from 1945 on. Working-class women's activism during the miners' strike was unprecedented in scope and key to keeping the strike going. The project will produce a major new collection of oral histories, and use the strike as a lens to examine working-class experiences and subjectivities more broadly in postwar Britain.

The Nahrein Network (2017-2021)

The destruction of heritage sites throughout Syria and Iraq since 2014 has been widely publicised, and millions of dollars of international aid are being pumped into the documentation, digitisation, and conservation of threatened and damaged sites across the Middle East. However, much of this aid is being administered with little thought for local interests and impacts. Over a four-year period from late 2017, the Nahrein Network will work with people across the region to reclaim their ancient heritage as local history, putting it to constructive use for their communities. It will harness interdisciplinary humanities research and education to help Middle Eastern universities, museums, archives and cultural heritage sites build their capacity to contribute to their countries' economic, cultural and social development in the years ahead.

Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going (2017-2018)

Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going is a new project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council that aims to make many more people aware of the research done by an earlier AHRC project, Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s (2013-15). This collected, in the form of anonymised questionnaires and interviews, the memories of almost 1000 people of 'going to the pictures' half a century ago. We are extremely grateful to everyone who shared their recollections in these ways.

Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going will co-organise, with local partners, more than 40 events around the UK to present the fascinating results of the earlier project. Our partners will include local civic and history societies, film clubs, University of the Third Age members and schools.

Democracy, Autocracy, and Sovereign Debt: How polity shaped government-creditor relations in the first age of globalisation (2016-2019)

Sovereign debt is a financial as well as a political topic. Politics shapes the way governments borrow and repay. The main research question of this project is how political systems influenced the way peripheral governments managed their debt in the first financial globalisation, from c. 1870 to 1914.

We approach this by studying a number of case studies that mix different political regimes and debt records. Besides contributing to our understanding of how politics affected creditor-governments relations before 1914, the topic has also contemporary relevance, since indebted governments face increasingly more political challenges to manage their fiscal accounts nowadays.

This project is supported by the British Academy Newton Fund (2016-19).

'Re-imagining italianità' is an international research network financed by the Leverhulme Trust and based at the UCL Centre for Transnational History, with collaborators in Cambridge, Italy, Brown University (US) and Campinas (Brazil). Over a period of three years, starting in February 2016, the project will investigate nineteenth-century Italian opera on a global scale in order to critically assess existing ideas on the relationship between music and national identity. Based on a cross-disciplinary collaboration, the network will analyse nineteenth-century discourse on music and national character; trace the global circulation of people, ideas and goods associated with the Italian opera industry; and examine particular cities and institutions as sites of cultural encounters.

In the Western world today, witches, necromancers, demonologists, and magicians are the stuff of legends and stories, but they once seemed very real and inspired powerful emotions: anxiety and terror, envy and anger, pain and grief. The supernatural was essential to a subtle, sophisticated, and pervasive worldview, and was experienced on a daily basis by sane, intelligent people whose outlook on the universe was no less coherent than our own.

Understanding how our ancestors felt about these potent yet unseen environmental forces, and how these feelings changed between 1300 and 1900, is the main purpose of this three-year research project (2015-2018). It brings together historians of the medieval, early modern, and modern periods to examine evidence of human engagement with diverse supernatural realms (through prayer and contemplation, ritual and conjuration, astrology and divination) in the contexts of cosmos, community, and household, with a view to reconstructing the emotions that connected past selves with the supernatural and, in turn and ultimately, inner lives.

Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical History (2015-2020)

This Wellcome Trust-funded project seeks to critically evaluate the history of what is viewed as an 'epidemic' of chronic and non-communicable diseases in sub-Saharan Africa and provide an historical account of the evolution of chronic and non-communicable diseases in Africa, going beyond a simple account of 'transition', and to contribute to wider debates on the nature of epidemiological change.

Passionate Politics (2014-2017)

A key strand of western political thought has tended to view the passions and the passionate nature of human beings with suspicion if not outright hostility. Until recently, the passions have drawn the attention of most political theorists and philosophers above all because of their capacity to wreak havoc in the social order. Whatever the term employed - emotions, feelings, affect, desires - they have been called at best incompatible with, at worst disruptive to our prevailing ideal of politics.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, however, the place of the passions in politics looks very different. Emotions are now accepted to be cognitive modes of thought in themselves. But if our desires and predilections influence the choices we make, they are necessarily caught up in political judgements, too. The passions are also crucial for providing the emotional basis of individual and social identities, and thus for the collective political communities in which we are all caught up. Similarly, no movement or ideology could do without the passionate conviction of its members to drive political action or change. Our understanding of key moments of social change thus remains impoverished if we fail to take into account the importance of grief as a response to social upheaval, the role of love and empathy in the creation of political and social solidarities, or the roots of political dissent in anger.

Conflicts between nationalities have long been seen as the Habsburg Empire's fatal weakness, explaining its eventual collapse in the wake of World War One. A transnational approach to the history of the Empire questions the validity of this interpretation. This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, employs conceptual challenges emerging from the field of transnational studies to reassess the nationality question in the Habsburg Empire. It does so by means of a specific set of research questions applied to four case studies. Three of these case studies investigate specific nationalities within the Empire (Czechs, Italians, and German speakers from Transylvania); the fourth case study looks at cultural practices connected to music theatre within the Empire. Opera created links between the elites and the middle classes, while also cutting across national boundaries.

Public Knowledge and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2014-2017)

This research, which is generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, explores how the transnational circulation of knowledge shaped the formation of nation-states in Latin America during the century after Iberian rule was defeated in the 1820s. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, it combines the methods of global intellectual history and sociology of knowledge to develop a new way of thinking about nations as communities of shared knowledge. This idea makes it possible to take into account how nations are experienced and enacted as well as how they are imagined.